The Angel of History

Author:   Carolyn Forché
Publisher:   Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Edition:   International ed.
ISBN:  

9781852243074


Pages:   96
Publication Date:   27 October 1994
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable   Availability explained
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The Angel of History


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Overview

The Angel of History bears witness to the moral disasters of our times: war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb. The book is a meditation on memory – how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems are fragmented, discordant, reflecting the effects of such experience, but forming a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations we make to survive what is unsurvivable. It is divided into five sections dealing with the atrocities of war in France, Japan and Germany as well as Carolyn Forché's own experiences in Beirut and El Salvador. The title figure, the Angel of History – a figure imagined by Walter Benjamin – can record the miseries of humanity yet is unable either to prevent these miseries from happening or from suffering from the pain associated with them. Kevin Walker, in the Detroit Free Press, called the book 'a meditation on destruction, survival and memory'. Don Bogen, in The Nation, saw this as a logical development, since Forché’s work with her poetry of witness anthology Against Forgetting was 'instrumental in moving her poetry beyond the politics of personal encounter. The Angel of History is rather an extended poetic mediation on the broader contexts – historical, aesthetic, philosophical – which include [the 20th]…century’s atrocities,' wrote Bogen. And Steven Ratiner, reviewing the work for the Christian Science Monitor, called it one that 'addresses the terror and inhumanity that have become standard elements in the twentieth-century political landscape – and yet affirms as well the even greater reservoir of the human spirit'.

Full Product Details

Author:   Carolyn Forché
Publisher:   Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Imprint:   Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Edition:   International ed.
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 0.60cm , Length: 23.40cm
Weight:   0.190kg
ISBN:  

9781852243074


ISBN 10:   1852243074
Pages:   96
Publication Date:   27 October 1994
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable   Availability explained
The supplier advises that this item is temporarily unavailable. It will be ordered for you and placed on backorder. Once it does come back in stock, we will ship it out to you.

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Reviews

The Angel of History is instantly recognizable as a great book, the most humanitarian and aesthetically 'inevitable' response to a half century of atrocities that has yet been written in English. -- Calvin Bedient, The Threepenny Review The poignant cri de couer of this singular work most affect all who have an integrity still possible in this painfully despairing time. -- Robert Creeley I don't think I have ever come across a poem of such length that is nevertheless so beautifully transparent and haunting. -- James Merrill A dark, richly textured, complicated work...[ The Angel of History ] is that great rarity, an altogether new thing. -- Liz Rosenberg, Boston Globe Poetry of consummate beauty...reminiscent of Eliot's 'The Waste Land.' -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)


Author Information

Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950, and has taught at several universities. She was Director of Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, and held the Lannan Visiting Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, where she is now a University Professor. Her many honours include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts; the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award, given in 1997 for using her poetry as a ‘means to attain understanding, reconciliation, and peace within communities and between communities’; and most recently, Yale University's Windham-Campbell Prize. Her first collection, Gathering the Tribes (1976), was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. Her second book, The Country Between Us (1981; UK reissue from Bloodaxe, 2019), drew on her experiences in El Salvador before and during the civil war, and won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her later collections have drawn upon work written over many years: The Angel of History (HarperCollins, USA; Bloodaxe Books, 1994), Blue Hour (HarperCollins, USA; Bloodaxe Books, 2003), and In the Lateness of the World (Bloodaxe Books, UK' Penguin Press, USA, 2020). Her landmark anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (Norton, 1993), was followed by Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English: 1500-2001 (Norton, 2014), edited with Duncan Wu. She is Visiting Professor at Newcastle University, and edited the anthology The Mighty Stream: Poems in celebration of Martin Luther King (Bloodaxe Books / Newcastle University, 2017) with Jackie Kay. Her memoir What You Have Heard Is True: a memoir of witness and resistance (2019) was published by Penguin at the same time as Bloodaxe's UK reissue of her 1981 collection The Country Between Us, which covers the same period as the memoir. Her translations include Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (with Munir Akash, 2003), Claribel Alegría's Flowers from the Volcano (1983), and Robert Desnos's Selected Poetry (with William Kulik, 1991).

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